What I Did for Love (Wynette, Texas #5)(23)

She phoned her people—all of them but her father—with the news. She did a halfway decent job of professing her joy and excitement at being married to the Playboy of the Western World, but it wouldn’t be nearly as easy with her friends. She deliberately left messages on their home voice mail so she didn’t have to speak to them directly. As for her father…One crisis at a time.

Bram came up behind her while she was in the bathroom. If she let him walk all over her now, there’d be no retakes. He needed to see a whole new Georgie York.

She picked up the lipstick wand she’d just set down. “I don’t share my makeup,” she said. “Use your own.”

“Is this stuff really nonsmear? I don’t want to get it all over me when I french you.”

“You’re not frenching me.”

“Wanna bet?” He crossed his arms over his chest and planted a shoulder against the doorjamb. “You know what I think?”

“You actually think?”

“I think all that crap you were spouting off about protecting your career is bogus.” The doorbell rang. “The real reason you want to go through with this farce is because you never got over me.”

“Oh, gee, you found me out.” She elbowed him hard as she passed through the doorway.

Bram caught her before she reached the living room, and he tousled her hair. “There. Now you look like you just tumbled out of bed.” He headed for the door. “Smile for the nice photographer.”

Mel Duffy lumbered in, bringing the smell of onion rings with him. “Georgie, you look gorgeous.” He studied the room, then gestured toward the balcony. “Let’s start out here.”

A few minutes later, they were posing by the railing with the sun sinking and their arms entwined around each other’s waists. Duffy took some close-ups of the bride and groom laughing over the plastic diamond, then suggested Bram pick her up.

Just what she didn’t want…Bram Shepard dangling her thirty stories above the ground.

Her filmy white skirt swirled around them as he swept her into his arms. She dug her fingers in his bicep. He gazed down at her, his face all lovey-dovey. She slipped her palm inside his jacket and lovey-doveyed him right back. She wondered what it would be like not to fake emotions she wasn’t even close to feeling. At least this time, she’d chosen her path, and that had to count for something.

Duffy shifted position. “How about a kiss?”

“Exactly what I had in mind.” Bram’s voice was liquid sex.

She manufactured a silky smile. “I was hoping you’d ask.”

He dipped his head, and just like that, she was sucked back to the past—the day of their first on-screen kiss.

She’d stood by another railing then, one that looked down on the Chicago River near the Michigan Avenue Bridge. As usual, they were spending the first couple of weeks shooting exteriors before they returned to L.A. to film the rest of what would be their fifth season. It was a Sunday morning in late July, and the police had temporarily closed off the area. Even with a breeze blowing in from the lake, it was already nearly ninety degrees.

“Is Bram here yet?” Jerry Clarke, their director, called out.

“Not yet,” the A.D. replied.

Bram hated early-morning calls nearly as much as he’d come to hate playing Skip, and Georgie knew for a fact that Jerry had assigned a production assistant to get him out of bed. Her hands curled over the railing. She couldn’t wait for today to be over. A year might have passed since the ugly night on the boat, but she still hadn’t forgiven him for what he’d done or forgiven herself for letting him go so far. She coped by pretending he didn’t exist. Only when the cameras began to roll and he turned into her Skip Scofield with his gentle, intelligent eyes and worried, caring expression did she let down her defenses.

They’d dressed her that day in a skinny, but not too skinny, T-shirt and a short, but not too short, cotton skirt. The producers had begun letting her have more auburn added to her hair, but she still hated the curls. Not only did the network own her hair, but they owned the rest of her, too. Her contract prohibited body piercing, tattoos, sexual scandal, and drug abuse. Apparently Bram’s contract forbade nothing.

The director exploded in frustration. “Somebody go find the son of a bitch!”

“The son of a bitch is right here.” Bram slithered forward, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, his bloodshot eyes at odds with his light blue knit shirt, pressed chinos, and preppy wristwatch.

“Did you have a chance to look over the script?” Jerry said with open sarcasm. “We’re doing Skip and Scooter’s first kiss.”

“Yeah, I read it.” He pitched a cigarette butt through the railing. “Let’s get this bullshit over with.”

As she stood there in her girl-next-door clothes, she hated him so fiercely she burned with it. Those first few years, she’d been so determined to see him as a moody romantic figure waiting for the right woman to redeem him, but he was really just a garden-variety snake, and she was a sucker not to have figured that out right away.

They ran their lines and found their marks. The cameras began to roll. She waited for the magic to begin as Bram transformed himself into Skip.

SKIP

(Gazing tenderly at SCOOTER)

Scooter, what am I going to do with you?